Parting
by shinigami-lust
Summary: When it comes to a game of push and shove, sometimes, things can be pushed to the breaking point with no hope of return.


**Disclaimer:** Loveless and the characters of Loveless do not belong to me. I'm just an admiring fan taking a dive off the deep end. Please be kind!

**Author's Note:** If the opening sounds a bit weird, that's because I've made Kio quite multi-talented. On top of being an art student, he's also an accomplished pianist, and this short ficlet opens in the midst of one of his concerts. A lot of the stuff that goes on in Kio's head has much to do with my take on his character and many events and things that I've made up about his life, none of which are ever formally explored in both the anime and the manga (yet). My apologies if you don't find it appropriate. Feedbacks and reviews would be much appreciated:)

The notes roll off of his fingers in powerful strokes, one after another, like the throbbing beats of a thunderstorm releasing its torrent upon the world. If it can't be helped, then there's no use fighting it, Kio decides. He feels anger and disappointment, but more than that, a profound sense of sorrow that comes with the knowledge of one's own capitulation towards the inevitable. Of course _he_ wouldn't come. Wouldn't or couldn't—Kio didn't bother distinguishing between the two cases, since they both yielded the same result. Soubi Agatsuma was nowhere to be found. Packaging all of his frustrations into the ivory keys, Kio's music shed the tears that he couldn't shed himself.

It had been a foolish notion to begin with—a strange relationship of sorts, between two people wholly incapable of offering to each other the things that they mutually desire. It was an experiment that was doomed to failure from the very beginning. How or why it had lasted as long as it did, Kio couldn't fathom. But now they have come to that despicable fork in the road where Kio had chosen right and without words or action, Agatsuma-san had chosen left and there's not a single force in this world that could keep them together. There was a life that Kio had left behind and chosen to ignore with the hopes that whatever the alternative was, would get him one step closer to the thing that he desires most in this world. He had gotten close to that destination. Painfully close, but no further.

Maybe it is finally time to give up on empty dreams and return to the physical and tangible world that he had been groomed and trained to exist in all his life—a loveless and heartless world of pawns and sacrifices. The vicious battle has now been removed to an arena outside of his heart. It is time. There is nothing left for him here.

The song ended and the roaring applause sounded like hollow echoes in his mind. This was his final encore of the evening—last chance to dazzle the audience—and now it's over. Finished, like a heavy sigh drawn from his chest at the end of a long and trying journey. Perhaps in a perverse corner of his mind, Kio had hoped that he wouldn't come. If he did come, then the ties of loyalty, with which he had bound himself with, might have been too strong from him to break.

Kio returned to his apartment that night and began the tedious process of gathering his life's possessions. It was well into the wee hours of morning when the final box was packed and the last signs of his existence wiped clean from the white washed walls. The canvases, the paint brushes, the paints, and all the multitude of little portraits that he had accumulated over the years had been the first to go. Now, it is almost time for him to go as well. A sleek black Lexus is already waiting for him downstairs.

"Are you leaving?"

Kio didn't need turn around to know who it was that broke the crystalline silence. "Yeah."

"I see."

Tears are starting to gather on the corner of Kio's eyes but he refuses to submit to his weaker emotions. "Is that all you wanted to ask?"

"Will asking anything else change anything?"

Kio chews on that thought for a moment before answering with a small shake of his head. "No, probably not."

Silence.

Kio gathers his composure and picks up that final box as if it holds the weight of the world within its corrugated walls. He squares his shoulders and walks past his visitor without a single flicker of recognition in his eyes. "Good-bye, then."

There is a beat of hesitation before the accursed word tumbles out of the other's mouth. "Stay?" It was spoken softly, with much uncertainty, but it was also unmistakable in its gravity.

Kio stops in his tracks, yet not daring to turn around. Tears are sliding down his cheeks now, but that would be a humiliation for himself to observe and nobody else. He draws in a tight breath and exhales softly. "I can't. If…there's anything else I can do for you, you know how to reach me." _If…you had only said that word earlier, then maybe things would've turned out differently, but it's too late now. I can't bear to go back to the past and suffer through this all over again. We both know how this dance is going to end. I don't want it to come to that._

He never looked back.


End file.
